Black Fact & History

Alan Newton in the Bronx Thursday, free after 22 years in prison.

2006-07-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

Before Alan Newton was taken out of his holding cell and escorted into a Bronx courtroom yesterday, three other criminal cases had to be adjudicated — of people charged with theft, drug possession and assault.

Only then, after 22 years spent in prison for crimes he did not commit, did Alan Newton get his chance.

He blinked in the courtroom's bright light and appeared tense as lawyers talked on either side of him.

His lawyer, Vanessa Potkin — of the Innocence Project, a legal service that seeks to free convicts through DNA evidence — told the judge that newly tested DNA evidence had cleared her client of the 1984 rape, robbery and assault charges on which he had been sentenced to 13 1/3 to 40 years.

The prosecutor, Elisa Koenderman, agreed. Judge John N. Byrne of Bronx Criminal Court looked at the defendant for a moment and said, "Motion is granted," concluding Mr. Newton's improbable journey into the recesses of the American criminal justice system, and back.

It took another two hours for Mr. Newton, 44, to walk out a free man: Judge Byrne had to sign the release order, the court clerk had to fax it to the city's Department of Correction, and various papers had to be stamped and filed in triplicate.

And then, Mr. Newton walked out of the courtroom — not into the wonder of a sun-splashed day, as may have been the story's cinematic conclusion, but into a dark corner of a Bronx courthouse where journalists were waiting for a man who had spent the Bloomberg, Giuliani and Dinkins years, and a part of the Koch administration, behind bars.

He wore a blue shirt, a yellow tie and a beige Calvin Klein suit bought for him by Bobby Thomas, his best friend from childhood. The suit was a bit loose, in contrast to the close-fitting versions favored by Mr. Newton when he worked as a bank teller before his arrest.

One of the first things Mr. Newton said at the news conference was how bad he felt for the victim, identified as "V J," though his conviction had rested largely on her identification of him and on her trial testimony.

The victim, who selected Mr. Newton's picture from about 200 photographs of potential suspects in 1984, acknowledged that on the night of the attack she had drunk about 11 beers and had also taken Dilantin, an epilepsy medication, which is not to be mixed with alcohol.

But yesterday, even before he was asked about the victim, Mr. Newton said he was sorry his exoneration "opens an old wound and denies her closure."

Mr. Newton said he wanted a home-cooked meal prepared by one of his sisters, but he settled yesterday afternoon for a meal at Amy Ruth's, a soul food restaurant in Harlem.

He also wanted to visit the World Trade Center site, in part because he had once worked at the trade center for New York Telephone Company, which has long since ceased to exist.

Mr. Newton also visited his wife, to whom he was married about 10 years ago, while he was in prison.

Most important, he said, he wanted to see his mother's grave in New Jersey. She died shortly after he was sent to prison.

"The stress killed her," said Mr. Newton's brother, Anthony Newton. "It's that simple."

For his part, Alan Newton seemed intent on moving forward. "I try not to stay angry," he said, "because if you stay angry, you can't grow."

He hopes to finish the five courses he needs to earn a bachelor's degree in business administration. He started taking college courses after he was sent to prison, at age 23.

In prison, Mr. Newton had repeatedly rejected a slot in a sex offender treatment program, which could have led to an early release. He thought it would have been tantamount to an admission of guilt, he said yesterday.

On many days in prison, family members said, Mr. Newton grew deeply depressed, but he said yesterday that he had never entirely given up on the possibility that he would be freed. "I kept my hope alive," he said. "I just didn't know when it was going to happen."

Ms. Koenderman, chief prosecutor of sex crimes in the Bronx, said Mr. Newton's conviction was a tragedy. She was thanked repeatedly by Mr. Newton's defense team for helping to prod authorities to look for the DNA evidence that eventually led to his release.

The victim's "rape kit" was found in a police storage unit after the Police Department had repeatedly said it had been destroyed.

"My job is to see justice done, and if justice means exonerating someone, I'm not afraid to look at the evidence and get it done," she said. "We're here to see the ends of justice, no matter how that turns out."

After the news conference, Mr. Newton posed for photographs and shook the hands of strangers before jumping into a green Ford Explorer.

Soon he was chatting away on a cellphone, looking immediately comfortable with the unfamiliar device, as he was sped away down 161st Street toward Manhattan, looking like any other New Yorker.

Fuck the police most of them are a peice of shit, that hide behind their guns pussies

2006-05-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Autopsy results obtained by CNN show a retarded man was shot in the back when he was killed by New Orleans police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

This contradicts testimony by a police sergeant that the victim had turned toward officers and was reaching into his waistband when shot.

"Clearly he was shot from behind," said famed New York pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who examined the body for the family's lawyer.

A prosecutor said the case will go before a grand jury soon and acknowledged the investigation includes the possibility of police wrong-doing.

Ronald Madison, 40, was mentally retarded and lived at home with his mother. He had no criminal record. He was shot when police responded to a report of gunfire on a bridge over the flooded Industrial Canal on Sunday, September 4, six days after Katrina hit New Orleans last year.

It was a week of dire flooding, rampant looting, death by drowning. Police were strained, beset by suicides and desertion. Four people were killed in confrontations with police that weekend alone.

Madison's older brother, Lance, said he and Ronald were walking across the Danziger bridge toward another brother's dental office when teen-agers ran up behind him and opened fire that Sunday morning.

By his account, he and Ronald were running away toward the crest of the bridge when a police team, responding to the report of gunshots, arrived in a rental truck and opened fire on people on the bridge.

Police Superintendent Warren Riley told CNN, "Several of the people were shot and two were killed by our officers in a running gun battle... Most police shoot-outs last somewhere between six and twelve seconds, and it's over with. This was a running gun battle that went on several minutes."

One teen-ager, still unidentified, was killed near the base of the bridge. Another was critically wounded. Three other people with them were also shot and were hospitalized.

Lance Madison said a policeman pointed a rifle at Ronald and shot him as the two of them were running up the bridge. Lance said he helped carry his wounded brother to a motel on the other side of the canal and left him there as Lance kept running to seek help.

The Police Department said in a press release last fall that Ronald Madison, whom it called a second unidentified gunman, "was confronted by a New Orleans Police Officer. The suspect reached into his waist and turned toward the officer who fired one shot fatally wounding him."

Testifying in a preliminary hearing last fall, Police Sgt. Arthur Kaufman said much the same thing: "One subject turned, reached in his waistband, turned on the officers."

Autopsy results, made available to CNN by a source involved in the investigation, directly contradict that police account.

The findings list five separate gunshot wounds in Ronald Madison's back. Three went through the body and exited in front. There were two other wounds in his right shoulder. None of the shots entered his body from the front.

CNN had sued the coroner of Orleans Parish to try to get official access to the autopsy report. At a court hearing on that lawsuit in New Orleans a week ago, the coroner, Dr. Frank Minyard, verified the handwritten autopsy report obtained elsewhere by CNN was indeed prepared in his office by a pathologist on his staff who listed the wounds in the victim's right back.

Under cross-examination by a CNN lawyer, Dr. Minyard testified those five wounds in the back "were entrance wounds, yes."

Dr. Michael Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, met with CNN in New York City two weeks ago to discuss his own observations when he examined Ronald Madison's body for the family lawyer last fall. Asked if Ronald could have been facing the police when shot, Dr. Baden said, "Absolutely not."

No weapon was found on or near Ronald Madison's body.

Asst. District Attorney Dustin Davis, testifying in the same court hearing on the CNN lawsuit, said a grand jury has been assigned to investigate the Danziger Bridge shootings. However, the grand jury has not yet met on the case because the New Orleans Police Dept. has yet to complete its final report, eight months after those deaths.

The CNN attorney asked Davis, "What you are investigating in that case is whether any of the police officers may be indicted for homicide, is that correct?"

Davis answered, "That's partially correct. We are also looking at Mr. Madison's involvement in the incident."

Lance Madison was arrested on the other side of the bridge where his brother was killed and was accused of shooting at the police officers in the gun battle. He, too, had no weapon when taken into custody. He was released from bail after six months because the District Attorney's office had not initiated any prosecution, although the investigation remains pending.

Sgt. Kaufman testified at the bail hearing for Lance Madison last fall that another policeman saw Lance throw a gun into the Industrial Canal as he was going over the bridge. Lance Madison denies that. He told CNN correspondent Drew Griffin, "I had no gun, at all." Asked if Ronald had a gun, Lance answered, "No, he didn't."

In a CNN interview earlier this month, Griffin told Police Chief Warren Riley, "We understand Ronald Madison was shot in the back five times."

Riley said, "Those are things I can't comment on and no one can comment on until the investigation is concluded."

Griffin asked Riley if he was concerned about his officers' actions and Riley replied, "Certainly, we do not condone our officers overreacting, even in the most chaotic time," but he went on, "We don't know that they overreacted. From the radio transmission, it sounds like their lives were in danger."

Riley turned down a request by CNN to interview the officers who were involved.

A 25-year career employee at Federal Express, Lance Madison has no criminal record.

At the end of the CNN interview, Riley conceded the two Madison brothers may not have been connected with the other people on the bridge that day.

"I don't know if those young men were innocent or not. I really don't know if they were with that group or not," Riley said. "I really don't know."

Then they say was in the past

2006-05-03T02:12:00.000-07:00

Some Poor White Trash Just Can't Let It GO

Bravest gets
light slap for KKK prank

BY ROBERT F. MOORE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

A white Brooklyn firefighter slipped a Ku Klux Klan hood over his head and mocked one of the city's few black firefighters - drawing only a reprimand from FDNY brass.

The white firefighter and other Bravest who witnessed the incident but failed to report it were ordered to undergo sensitivity training. None of them was suspended or fired, FDNY officials said yesterday.

The discipline was dismissed as a mere slap on the wrist by critics of the FDNY, which is being investigated by the Justice Department for its hiring practices, including claims of discrimination against blacks and women.

"The only thing worse than the firefighter's actions is Fire Commissioner [Nicholas] Scoppetta's inaction," said FDNY Capt. Paul Washington, who heads the Vulcan Society, an organization that represents black firefighters. "When you don't punish anyone, you send the message that this will be tolerated."

But FDNY officials defended the sanctions against the firefighters, while refusing to identify them or the Brooklyn firehouse where the November incident took place. "There was a full and complete investigation and all parties were satisfied with the resolution," said Frank Gribbon, the FDNY's chief spokesman. "The matter is closed."

The incident, which was reported yesterday in the Chief-Leader newspaper, took place after the black firefighter got a series of phone calls from a retired comrade, who repeatedly called him the "N-word," sources said.

The black firefighter slammed the phone down each time and later complained to fellow Bravest. Later that night, the black firefighter was summoned to the kitchen for dinner. When he arrived, he found a white firefighter wearing the KKK hood.

The black firefighter used his cell phone to snap a photo of the firefighter wearing the hood. A source said the black firefighter, who joined the department about four years ago, did not want to file a formal complaint.

But he later showed the photo to Washington's brother, FDNY Lt. Kevin Washington, who reported it, sources said. "It was a stupid thing," an FDNY official said yesterday. "It was a very stupid thing."

The black and white firefighters could not be reached for comment. Sources said they still work at the same firehouse.

Fewer than 3% of the FDNY's 11,400 uniformed members are black. About 92%, are white.

Originally published on May 3, 2006

The Origin Of The White Race

2006-02-07T06:49:00.000-08:00

The Origin Of The White Race

After the destruction of mankind by the flood, Noah and his wife, his three sons and their wives were the only people that were saved. The entire earth at this time was of one speech and one language. Men began to congregate and to build a tower up to heaven. God disapproved of its construction. He confused man’s language and scattered them towards the four directions of the earth. The sons of Noah were: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Because the world was populated from these three sons of Noah it is proper to classify men only according to this classification: Shemites, Hamites and Japhites; and not Caucasoid, Mongoloid, or Negroid. The latter category is a modern anthropological classification of Johann F Blumenbach.

The ancient people did not classify races according to skin color, like the modern nations of Europe and America. The ancients, including the Greeks and Romans, identified people according to their national tribal names. They used such names as Vandals, Saxons, Ethiopians, Carthagians, Jews, Arabs, Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Moors. They did not use the term Negro (which is a modern term) to refer to the black races or the word Caucasian to refer to the white races. Dividing the world along a color line was an idea that originated with the white supremacist in Europe after the Renaissance. The Europeans did not have any great civilization immediately after the fall of Greece and Rome.

During the middle Ages, the black nations of Africa and Asia had the greatest political, economical, educational, and military influence in the world. At this time, Europe existed in a state of darkness for a thousand years. In the seventeenth century and later, Europe began to emerge out of the slough of ignorance, and certain Germans and other conceived of themselves as belonging to a superior race. Johann F. Blumenbach, a German (1752-1840), was the first to divide humanity on the basis of skin color. Up to this time, no such attempts had been made. His classification set up a color line, to the detriment of later generations. Blumenback classified five chief races of mankind: the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Ethiopian, the American (American Indians), and Malayan.

Moreover, he considered the Caucasian, to be the original race. Blumenbach , the anthropologist, named the whites after the Caucasus Mountains (these mountains are situated between the black and Caspian seas), because he thought the purest white people originated there. A third man by the name of H.S. Chamberlain wanted to advance the supremacy of the white race Nordic race and its culture. These man attributed psychological value and importance to race. When God wanted to show Moses a miracle, He turned his hand white as snow; then he turned it back again to its original color (black).

Get the book to find out more about what I’m saying From Babylon To Timbuktu a history of ancient black races including the black Hebrews by Rudolph R. Windsor

This Why Most African Americans Hate Cracker Ass Cops

2005-12-08T12:04:00.000-08:00

It's crackers like them who pull you over in your car and plant drugs on you. That's why when they catch a bullet in the ass we say it's good for them.

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- An officer was suspended and others face discipline after making videos containing sexist, racist and homophobic material for an office Christmas party, officials said.

About 20 officers participated in creating or performing in the videos, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief Heather Fong said.

City officials said the videos, created as a spoof about life on the force, include a skit of a white police officer in a patrol car running over a black homeless woman.

"This is a dark day, an extremely dark day, in the history of the San Francisco Police Department," said Fong, who called the acts "egregious, shameful and despicable."

"It is shameful, it is offensive, it is sexist, it is homophobic and it is racist," Newsom said. "We're going to make sure that it ends, it ends immediately."

Cohen defending the video as satiric and blasted the police chief during an appearance on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Thursday.

"After the video was seen, now they're pulling race cards," Cohen said. "It was just made for us, so shame on her," he added, referring to Wong.

"We did this absolutely for morale purposes," Cohen explained. "We did it because there are some very fun and interesting characters at the station and we thought it would be fun to showcase and laugh at their idiosyncrasies and personalities."

His attorney, Daniel Horowitz, said Cohen wasn't informed he was suspended, and paperwork showed he had been moved to a file room.

Horowitz defended the videos as art, saying they contained self-analytical material that reflected how the community saw police.

"Maybe it is dumb, and if it is dumb, who is releasing this nationally?" the attorney said on KRON-TV. "The mayor and the police chief."

The department's internal affairs division launched an investigation after the videos were discovered on an officer's Web site. They have since been removed.

In one video, which spoofed the TV show "Charlie's Angels," three gun-toting police women in T-shirts and blue jeans report to a police captain, who sits behind a desk and suggestively licks his lips.

Through the rest of the clip, a street person, an apparent transvestite, and several others lick their lips in a similar manner and say, "Ohhh, captain."

Another video showed a lazy pair of officers who ignored several dispatches while reading the newspaper, napping in their cruiser and practicing martial arts in a parking lot.

When gunshots are reported, they race off with their lights flashing and siren wailing -- only to show up at a massage parlor the driver had spotted in a magazine ad.

If they can destroy a country and build it up again, why can't they fix this state

2005-11-30T02:57:00.000-08:00

New Orleans mayor gets an earful

Residents complain of response three months after Katrina

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana -- Frustrated New Orleans residents appeared before Mayor Ray Nagin Tuesday with complaints about the response to Hurricane Katrina, with two speakers asking why a nation fighting to stabilize Iraq can't resolve a crisis at home.

One woman suggested that New Orleans residents board buses and travel to Washington to complain to Congress, which has approved billions of dollars for relief efforts.

"If they can destroy a country and build it up again, why can't they fix this state?" the woman asked.

A man added, "It's a hard thing to believe that the United States of America is spending nearly one billion [dollars] per week in Iraq, and here, in New Orleans, the United States, we're being neglected."

"Why do we have to beg and plead with our president, our congressmen, our elected leaders to tell them that we need help, when it's on the media every day?"

Of more than a dozen speakers at a town hall meeting called by Nagin three months after Katrina, several sharply criticized the pace of restoring natural gas by Entergy New Orleans.

"I am in the cold," said a woman who identified herself as the owner of a bed and breakfast. "I can't cook. I can't do business. I can't take advantage of all the business people who are coming here."

Power company seeks protection

Pat Ricks, Entergy's customer service manager, told the residents that water from the August 29 storm that flooded most of New Orleans entered the gas lines, which he described as a "spider web."

Ricks said the effort to drain the water was like "sucking water out of a bathtub with a straw."

Entergy crews have removed 923,500 gallons of water from the gas pipelines in the city, according to the utility's Web site.

Ricks agreed to meet with the woman privately and give her an estimate of when she can expect service to resume.

Before Katrina, Entergy New Orleans had 190,000 electrical power customers and 145,000 gas customers. The company filed for bankruptcy protection shortly after the hurricane hit.

Power is now available to 115,000 of those customers and gas is available to 76,000, the utility said on its Web site.

"While Entergy crews continue to make repairs to its heavily damaged substations and distribution infrastructure in the hardest-hit areas of the city, the company does not anticipate that it will restore large numbers of customers at the same pace as it has since Katrina made landfall," the Web site says.

Residents also complained about a lack of debris and trash removal, inadequate or no response from police to calls, and price gouging by some landlords.

One woman, angry at Nagin for what she said was the city's inadequate hurricane response, said she is being evicted from her home even though she has been paying her rent. Her rent check was refused for November.

"As far as rent gouging, we're getting more and more complaints of that," Nagin said.

New Orleans vs. Iraq

Katrina killed 1,086 people in Louisiana, and more than $62 billion has been set aside by the federal government for relief efforts there and in other states.

By comparison, the Pentagon has said a year in Iraq costs $69 billion, based on a monthly average of $5.8 billion.

White House budget chief Josh Bolten has said "substantially more" money will be needed to help hurricane-ravaged communities rebuild.

Nagin addressed security concerns at Tuesday's meeting in a New Orleans hotel.

He said there are 1,500 police officers and 2,500 National Guard members patrolling parts of New Orleans. The Guard is committed to staying until police are fully able to step in, Nagin said.

Nagin said the city's 2 a.m. curfew will remain in place.

"There are still way too many areas in the city that are dark at night," the mayor said.

"I'm still not totally convinced our police force is at the level of stabilization to handle" around-the-clock security, he said.

On Monday, Warren J. Riley -- the man Nagin named acting police superintendent after his predecessor stepped aside in the wake of Katrina -- was sworn in as the city's full-time chief.

After Eddie Compass stepped down, Riley moved swiftly to take control of the force, announcing an investigation of 12 officers accused of taking part in looting and suspending three officers seen on video beating an unarmed black man.

In addition, Riley fired 45 police officers and six civilians, accusing them of abandoning their posts either before or after Katrina flooded most of the city. More than 200 other officers remain under investigation.

The mayor is scheduled to host a second town hall meeting on Wednesday in Memphis, Tennessee, for displaced residents.

Black Wall Street: The True Story

2005-11-14T21:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.blackwallstreet.freeservers.com/

Where did the word "picnic" comes from?

It was typical to have a picnic on a Friday evening in Oklahoma.
The word was short for "pick a nigger" to lynch.
They would lynch a Black male and cut off body parts as souvenirs.
This went on every weekend in this country, and it was all across the county.

A Brief History.

If anyone truly believes that the last April attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma was the most tragic bombing ever to take place on United States soil, as the media has been widely reporting, they're wrong -- plain and simple. That's because an even deadlier bomb occurred in that same state nearly 75 years ago. Many people in high places would like to forget that it ever happened.

Searching under the heading of "riots," "Oklahoma" and "Tulsa" in current editions of the World Book Encyclopedia, there is conspicuously no mention whatsoever of the Tulsa race riot of 1921, and this omission is by no means a surprise, or a rare case. The fact is, one would also be hard-pressed to find documentation of the incident, let alone and accurate accounting of it, in any other "scholarly" reference or American history book.

That's precisely the point that noted author, publisher and orator Ron Wallace, a Tulsa native, sought to make nearly five years ago when he began researching this riot, one of the worst incidents of violence ever visited upon people of African descent. Ultimately joined on the project by colleague Jay Wilson of Los Angeles, the duo found and compiled indisputable evidence of what they now describe as "a Black holocaust in America."

The date was June 1, 1921, when "Black Wallstreet," the name fittingly given to one of the most affluent all-Black communities in America, was bombed from the air and burned to the ground by mobs of envious whites. In a period spanning fewer than 12 hours, a once thriving 36-Black business district in northern Tulsa lay smoldering--a model community destroyed, and a major African-American economic movement resoundingly defused.

The night's carnage left some 3,000 African Americans dead, and over 600 successful businesses lost. Among these were 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores and two movie theaters, plus a hospital, a bank, a post office, libraries, schools, law offices, a half dozen private airplanes and even a bus system. As could have been expected the impetus behind it all was the infamous Ku Klux Klan, working in consort with ranking city officials, and many other sympathizers.

In their self-published book, Black Wallstreet: A Lost Dream, and its companion video documentary, Black Wallstreet: A Black Holocaust in America!, the authors have chronicled for the very first time in the words of area historians and elderly survivors what really happened there on that fateful summer day in 1921 and why it happened. Wallace similarly explained to me why this bloody event from the turn of the century seems to have had a recurring effect that is being felt in predominately Black neighborhoods even to this day.

The best description of Black Wallstreet, or Little Africa as it was also known, would be liken it to a mini-Beverly Hills. It was the golden door of the Black community during the early 1900s, and it proved that African Americans had successful infrastructure. That's what Black Wallstreet was all about.

The dollar circulated 36 to 100 times, sometimes taking a year for currency to leave the community. Now in 1995, a dollar leaves the Black community in 15-minutes. As far as resources, there were Ph.D.'s residing in Little Africa, Black attorneys and doctors. One doctor was Dr. Berry who owned the bus system. His average income was $500 a day, a hefty pocket change in 1910.

During that era, physicians owned medical schools. There were also pawn shops everywhere, brothels, jewelry stores, 21 churches, 21 restaurants and two movie theaters. It was a time when the entire state of Oklahoma had only two airports, yet six Blacks owned their own planes. It was a very fascinating community.

The area encompassed over 600 businesses and 36 square blocks with a population of 15,000 African Americans. And when the lower-economic Europeans looked over and saw what the Black community created, many of them were jealous. When the average student went to school on Black Wallstreet, he wore a suit and tie because of the morals and respect they were taught at a young age.

The mainstay of the community was to educate every child. Nepotism was the one word they believed in. And that's what we need to get back to in 1995. The main thoroughfare was Greenwood Avenue, and it was intersected by Archer and Pine Streets. From the first letters in each of those three names, you get G.A.P., and that's where the renowned R and B music group the Gap Band got its name. They're from Tulsa.

Black Wallstreet was a prime example of the typical Black community in America that did businesses, but it was in an unusual location. You see, at the time, Oklahoma was set aside to be a Black and Indian state. There were over 28 Black townships there. One third of the people who traveled in the terrifying "Trail of Tears" along side the Indians between 1830 to 1842 were Black people.

The citizens of this proposed Indian and Black state chose a Black governor, a treasurer from Kansas named McDade. But the Ku Klux Klan said that if he assumed office that they would kill him within 48 hours. A lot of Blacks owned farmland, and many of them had gone into the oil business. The community was so tight and wealthy because they traded dollars hand-to-hand, and because they were dependent upon one another as a result of the Jim Crow laws.

It was not unusual that if a resident's home accidentally burned down, it could be rebuilt within a few weeks by neighbors. This was the type of scenario that was going on day- to-day on Black Wallstreet. When Blacks intermarried into the Indian culture, some of them received their promised '40 acres and a mule' and with that came whatever oil was later found on the properties.

Just to show you how wealthy a lot of Black people were, there was a banker in the neighboring town who had a wife named California Taylor. Her father owned the largest cotton gin west of the Mississippi [River]. When California shopped, she would take a cruise to Paris every three months to have her clothes made.

There was also a man named Mason in nearby Wagner County who had the largest potato farm west of the Mississippi. When he harvested, he would fill 100 boxcars a day. Another brother not far away had the same thing with a spinach farm. The typical family then was five children or more, though the typical farm family would have 10 kids or more who made up the nucleus of the labor.

On Black Wallstreet, a lot of global business was conducted. The community flourished from the early 1900s until June 1, 1921. That's when the largest massacre of non-military Americans in the history of this country took place, and it was lead by the Ku Klux Klan. Imagine walking out of your front door and seeing 1,500 homes being burned. It must have been amazing.

Survivors we interviewed think that the whole thing was planned because during the time that all of this was going on, white families with their children stood around the borders of their community and watched the massacre, the looting and everything--much in the same manner they would watch a lynching.

I WAS BORN AND RAISED HERE, AND I HAD NEVER heard of the riot," Tulsa district attorney Bill LaFortune is saying. He is sitting in front of a massive desk on the fourth floor of the Tulsa County Courthouse. On the edge of his desk is a manila folder stuffed with documents, old newspaper clips and grand-jury indictments relating to Tulsa's Race Riot of 1921, one of the worst in the nation's history.

LaFortune pulls out one of the few remaining copies of a self-published, eyewitness account of the riot, written by a young black woman named Mary Jones Parrish. A YMCA typing instructor, Parrish had included in her remarkable volume three wide-angle photographs of the destruction, taped and folded within the book like a triptych. Now LaFortune spreads open the panorama for his guest. "It looks like Hiroshima, or worse," he says.

The photographs are breathtaking: 35 blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, reduced to cinder and rubble. On a single night, more than 10,000 armed and crazed whites looted and burned down the city's entire black section. In the pictures on LaFortune's desk, the smoke is still rising off the scorched earth, drifting between charred trees and the few jagged remains of brick walls.

For most of the past 75 years, the riot remained Tulsa's brooding secret. But on June 1 of last year, the 75th anniversary of the event, Tulsa held its first commemorative service and erected a memorial. And in October LaFortune performed his own role in the ritual healing.

During an emotional ceremony, he cleared a long deceased black man named J. B. Stradford of the charge of inciting the riot.

Stradford was one of Tulsa's most prosperous black entrepreneurs in the 1910's. He owned a 65-room hotel, a savings and loan, and other real estate in Greenwood. Having lost everything in the riot, Stradford escaped to Chicago, where he began life anew and became a successful lawyer. When he died in 1935, at the age of 75, the incitement charge still hung over him. With the riot's anniversary, the family wanted his name cleared. But first LaFortune and Assistant District Attorney Nancy Little had to uncover the details of the events of 1921.

"I would almost say I was staggered by what I learned," Little said.

"I had heard my parents talk about a riot by black people that came out of a rape." She was bewildered to find out that neither half of that equation had been true. In particular, Little was struck by a series of firsthand accounts, all by black victims of the riot, in the back of Mary Jones Parrish's book. "Those stories," said Little, "were among the most moving I have ever read." And the more she read, the more she thought, "This doesn't look like a riot. It looks like a war, an invasion of the area.

Little's dismay is shared by almost any Tulsan today who learns the truth about the riot. Tulsa, after all, had none of the bitter memories of the Civil War or Reconstruction. It was no sprawling northern metropolis plagued by poverty, unemployment and rotting tenements. Nor was it a Southern backwater where racial prejudice was endemic. Tulsa was full of pride and prosperity on both sides of the tracks. The city's black section was as remarkable as the boomtown of the white oil barons. Moreover, this riot happened during the Roaring Twenties: in modern times. The fact that a southwestern frontier town could experience such a paroxysm of hate, anger and violence seemed to speak to the very notions of equality and civility. And white Tulsa's denial of its own guilt remains a case study in cultural amnesia.

TULSA IN THE 1920S WAS A BOOMTOWN WITH a short fuse. Originally part of the sprawling Indian Territory, Tulsa had for years been beyond the reach of state or federal law, and after the discovery of oil nearby at the turn of the century, the town became a notorious haven for criminals. An otherwise boisterous history, ordered up by the city in the 1970's, speculated about those early boom years: "There seemed to be an unwritten law between the town and the outlaws in which Tulsa furnished them with asylum in exchange for being spared from criminal acts." Even after Tulsa fell under the American legal system, it remained unusually rough. The volatile mix of desperadoes, gamblers, prostitutes, cowboys, wildcatters, roustabouts and Ku Kluxers was enough to weaken the knees of the bravest law-enforcement officials.

Many a town father decided it was more prudent--and sometimes more lucrative--to join the miscreants rather than fight them. James Mitchell, a student at the University of Tulsa in 1950, wrote his master's thesis on the politics of Tulsa in the early 1900s. "A vice ring consisting of newspapermen and politicians, operated a protection racket for illegal enterprises," he concluded. "Many crusades against open town conditions by newspapers in Tulsa's boom years were said to result when the editors were denied their part of the payoffs."

By 1910, Black Tulsans made up 10 percent of the city's population. Most of these residents were immigrants from the East and South, but many others were native to the area, having been former slaves of wealthy Creek Indians. The Blacks in Tulsa, totally segregated on the north side of the railroad tracks, were building up a prosperous community that boasted the second highest black literacy rate among Oklahoma counties, and a neighborhood of shops, hotels, gaming halls and restaurants that was gaining a reputation across the Southwest. The Greenwood section of Tulsa bristled with such energy, prosperity and promise, that Booker T. Washington himself--so the legend goes--dubbed Greenwood Avenue "the Black Wall Street."

This Black prosperity caused resentment among poorer whites, and the city elders worried that it was bad for the city's image. In 1912, the Tulsa Democrat complained: "Tulsa appears to be in danger of losing its prestige as the whitest town in Oklahoma." The paper went on to ask: "Does Tulsa wish a double invasion of criminal Negro preachers, Negro Shysters, crap shooters, gamblers, bootleggers (sic), prostitutes and smart alecs in general?"

At the time of the riot, the Ku Klux Klan had something of a stranglehold on Tulsa. Mitchell found that during the early 1920s the Klan "operated as a phantom regime," putting its imprimatur on political candidates. In the year of the riot alone, 59 Blacks were lynched in border and Southern states. Just six months before, in Oldenville, Oklahoma, a young Black man accused of assaulting a white woman was taken from jail, strung to a telephone pole, and riddled with bullets. The fact that a white man had been lynched in Tulsa the previous summer only proved that skin color was no protection. Accused of murdering a taxi driver, Roy Belton had been "mobbed" by a group of whites while the police directed traffic at the lynching site, ensuring everyone a good view. A Black newspaper wrote at the time: "The lynching of Roy Belton explodes the theory that a prisoner is safe on top of the Court House from mob violence."

Since the end of World War I, Black leaders had begun to encourage resistance to "Judge Lynch." In 1919, Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had declared: "When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed." In Tulsa, the success of the Black community had only made this resolve more powerful.

The incident that set off the Tulsa riot was the same incident that set off so many other race riots before it: a report of an assault by a Black man on a white woman. In the case of Tulsa, a woman of little credibility and a story apparently trumped the report up, a combination of an allegation by a newspaper with even less. But those small details would not be fully understood before Black Tulsa burned to the ground.

Walter White, a NAACP official who arrived in Tulsa during the height of the riot, would offer a detailed account of the "assault" in The Nation later that month. According to White, a young Black messenger named Dick Rowland called for an elevator in a downtown Tulsa building. The operator, a young white woman named Sarah Page, on finding she had been summoned by a Black man, started the car on its descent when Rowland was only halfway in. To save himself from injury, Rowland threw himself into the car, stepping on the girl's foot in doing so. Page screamed and, when a crowd gathered outside the elevator, claimed she had been attacked. The police arrested Rowland the following day but with little enthusiasm, perhaps because they knew the reputation of his accuser. Page, a new arrival in Tulsa, had left her husband in Kansas City, and Sheriff Willard McCullough had served divorce papers on her just two months before. He was reported to have said later that if half the charges alleged in the petition were true, "she is a notorious character."

Nevertheless, her charge of assault gave Tulsa's most disreputable newspaper enough to work with. The Tulsa Democrat had been purchased two years before by Richard Lloyd Jones --a cousin of Frank Lloyd Wright's, and a man who shared the architect's irascible temperament. Jones had changed the paper's name--to the Tulsa Tribune--but not its behavior. He not only continued the newspaper's racist ways but raised them to a higher power, referring to the Black section of Tulsa as either "Little Africa" or Niggertown."

The Tribune's coverage of the alleged attack on Page clearly inflamed feelings in Tulsa. The adjutant general of Oklahoma would later blame the riot on "an impudent Negro, a hysterical girl, and a yellow journal." No original copies of the offending articles exist today, either in bound volumes or on microfilm, having been destroyed in the years following the riot. But a University of Tulsa student managed to find a copy for his 1946 thesis, and published it in its entirety.

On its front page, the Tribune had charged that Rowland had attacked Page, "scratching her hands and face and tearing her clothes." The managing editor of the paper would, days later, admit that the scratches and torn clothes were fictions. The article stated that Rowland had been identified and arrested, had admitted grabbing Page's arm, and would be tried that afternoon. The final sentence was a guaranteed tearjerker: It stated that Page, whose age it gave as an improbable 17, "is an orphan who works as an elevator operator to pay her way through business college."

The Tribune also ran an editorial that day. No copies are known to survive, but people interviewed after the riot recalled an article that spoke of a lynching, and may have even encouraged one. Scott Ellsworth, who wrote the definitive book on the riot, "Death in a Promised Land" (1982), believes the headline read "To Lynch Negro Tonight." Whatever the Tribune said, the fuse was now lit. Shortly after the paper hit the newsstands, talk of a lynching was making its way around town. Within hours, hundreds of whites were milling in front of the courthouse--a common prelude to "Judge Lynch."

According to the unpublished memoirs of J.B. Stradford, the Tribune's stories "aroused the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan," and the KKK let it be known that they would "mob" Rowland that night. Stradford went on to say that Sheriff McCullough telephoned the office of the Tulsa Star, a Black newspaper, to warn "he expected an attack would be made on the jail that night." The sheriff promised that he would do all he could to protect Rowland, but that "if he found he could not cope with the situation, for us to get together and he would call us to help protect him."

A meeting was convened at the newspaper's offices. Stradford was sent for and called upon to speak. As he wrote in his memoirs, "I hesitated at first, for the situation was a perilous one; I advised the boys to be sober and wait until the sheriff called for us. I further said that I had expected something of that nature on account of the bitter feelings against our group and I said then as I had said before that the day a member of our group was mobbed in Tulsa, the streets would be bathed in blood." In the event of a lynching, Stradford left no doubt as to what he thought the community should do. "If I can't get anyone to go with me, I will go single-handed and empty my automatic into the mob and then resign myself to my fate."

In the end, the Black leaders assembled in the Star's office voted to go to the courthouse without waiting for the sheriff's summons. (Nor did they all heed Stradford's call to remain sober.) Fully armed, some 25 Blacks drove to the courthouse. Sheriff McCullough and Deputy Sheriff Barney Cleaver, Tulsa's first Black police officer met them there. The two law officers persuaded the emissaries to return to Greenwood, which they did peacefully. But the white crowd did not disperse. It continued to swell to ominous proportions, reaching 1,500 to 2,000. The Blacks returned, this time numbering between 50 and 75. Once again, McCullough and Cleaver tried to send the entourage home, but before they could succeed, an older white man made the mistake of confronting a young Black veteran of World War I. According to author Scott Ellsworth, the white man said, "Nigger, what are you going with that pistol?" The answer was as polite as it was direct: "I'm going to use it if I need to."

Within moments, a struggle for the gun ensued, a shot rang out and guns were blazing. The Blacks retreated toward Greenwood while the whites began to prepare for their revenge. In the next few hours, a dozen stores in downtown Tulsa that sold firearms--sporting-good stores, Pawnshops, and even jewelry stores--were broken into and looted. The National Guard Armory was spared only because a small band of guardsmen, warned in advance, held off the multitudes. The whites, now numbering 10,000, headed for Greenwood, as a smaller rear guard of Blacks tried to hold them off. Mary Jones Parrish, who had read about recent riots in Chicago and Washington, D.C., heard the firing in the distance and later wrote: "It was hours before the horror of it all dawned upon me.... It did not seem possible that prosperous Tulsa, the city which was so peaceful and quiet that morning, could be in the thrall of a great disaster."

The horror was also dawning on city officials. For hours Police Chief John Gustafson clung to the belief that local authorities could control the situation. In what was an act of either naivete' or depravity, he deputized as many as 500 white volunteers with "special commissions."

The NAACP's Walter White, being very light complexioned, volunteered for duty shortly after his arrival in town, and was given one of these commissions. "Now you can go out and shoot any Nigger you see," he was told, "and the law'll be behind you." White would spend a tense night riding about the city in the company of five members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Before long, even Gustafson realized events were out of his control. He signed a telegram, solicited by the governor, requesting the aid of the National Guard. The telegram was a model of concise communications: "Race riot developed here. Several killed. Unable to handle situation. Request that National Guard forces be sent by special train. Situation serious."

The fighting, pillaging and burning continued all night and into the morning. The riot was now a war; being fought building by building, block by block. The white's rage was blinding: At one point, the advancing mob noticed a lone, unarmed pedestrian across the street. Mistaking him for Black, the rioters opened fire, hitting him some 25 times. "Death was instantaneous," reported the Tulsa World the following morning. "He was hit so many times his body was mangled almost past identification." Now and again the mob would string a Black corpse to the rear bumper of an automobile and drag the body around town. Whenever a fire engine appeared on the scene, the white mob refused to let the fire crew deploy its hoses, forcing them back to the station. Police and their "deputies," those who were not actively engaged in the looting and burning, rounded up Black noncombatants, the elderly, women and children, and trucked them to holding facilities. At least one of these prisoners, Dr. A.C. Jackson, whom the Mayo brothers had once called the "most able Negro surgeon in America," was killed while being held in police "protection."

Mary Jones Parrish, who was still holed up with her daughter at the edge of the fighting, later wrote: "Looking south out of the window of what then was the Woods Building, we saw car loads of men with rifles unloading up near the granary.... Then the truth dawned upon us that our men were fighting in vain to hold their dear Greenwood."

The National Guard finally pulled into town by train from Oklahoma City at 9:15 a.m. with Adjutant General Charles Barrett in command. "In all my experience," Barrett wrote years later, "I have never witnessed such scenes as prevailed in this city when I arrived at the height of the rioting. Twenty-five thousand whites, armed to the teeth, were ranging the city in utter and ruthless defiance of every concept of law and righteousness. Motor Cars, bristling with guns swept through [the] city, their occupants firing at will." Nevertheless, the guards' first official act was to prepare and eat breakfast. One man who had the temerity to question this indulgence was immediately arrested. The guardsmen themselves, once they finished their breakfast, proceeded to round up the remaining Black residents at bayonet point, often drawing blood and frequently showing no sympathy for the homeless Blacks who were supposedly under their protection.

When it was all over, the Red Cross would report treating almost 1,000 people. Classrooms at the Booker T. Washington School were converted into an emergency facility. Parrish wrote: "I can never erase the sights of my first visit to the hospital. There were men wounded in every conceivable way, like soldiers after a big battle. Some with amputated limbs, burned faces, others minus an eye or with heads bandaged. There were women who were nervous wrecks, and some confinement cases. Was I in a hospital in France? No, in Tulsa.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO JUDGE THE SEVERITY OF THE TULSA riot by its death toll. The official count was 36, but the earliest newspaper accounts ranged between 75 and 175, and Scott Ellsworth gives 100 as his best guess. (Many Blacks and some whites believe the actual number of deaths was much higher, with truckloads of corpses dumped into mass graves or into the nearby Arkansas River.) There were other riots around that time that had official counts almost as high, or even higher--the East St. Louis riot of 1917 (at least 125 dead), the Chicago riot of 1919 (at 38 dead); the Elaine, Arkansas riot of 1919 (at least 30 dead). But what had been lost in Tulsa was far more than lives. It was a community and a dream.

As bad as the riot was, what followed was in many ways worse. To the hot-blooded crimes of murder, pillaging and arson were added the cold-blooded crimes of false imprisonment, unusual cruelty and incredible hypocrisy. Richard Lloyd Jones would once again set the tone in his editorial in the Tulsa Tribune: "Acres of ashes lie smoldering in what but yesterday was 'Niggertown'." He went on to use the riot as a pretext for attacking his political opponents. Over the next several days the headlines told the story of how white Tulsa would choose to view the riot for decades to come: PROPAGANDA OF NEGROES IS BLAMED.

BLACK AGITATORS BLAMED FOR RIOT. PLOT BY NEGRO SOCIETY? BLACKS HADLEADERS. BLOOD SHED IN RACE WAR WILL CLEANSE TULSA. NEGRO SECTION ABOLISHED BY CITY'S ORDER.

The attorney general of the state, during an address to the Tulsa City club two weeks after the tragedy, declared: "The cause of this riot was not Tulsa. It might have happened anywhere for the Negro is not the same man that he was 30 years ago when he was content to plod along his own road accepting the white man as his benefactor."

Over the following days and weeks white Tulsa put forth two ideas: Blacks had caused all the trouble, but the white community had opened its purses and hearts and rebuilt the burned neighborhood. The president of the chamber of commerce furnished press associations across the country with a broadside that stated: "The sympathy of the citizenship of Tulsa in a great wave has gone out to the unfortunate law-abiding Negroes who became victims of the action and bad advice of some of the lawless leaders, and as quickly as possible rehabilitation will take place and reparation be made."

In fact, at the same time the city fathers were busy passing new ordinances preventing Blacks from rebuilding in the Greenwood area. About the only intact structures left standing in the forlorn landscape were outhouses. Although awash in oil money during its boom years, Tulsa had never extended the city sewer lines to the Black north side.

And as the rioters emptied their cans of oil, they didn't bother with the outhouses, many of which were at some distance from the street. Now Tulsa wanted the north side of town to become a new industrial and transportation center. As for the Blacks, the mayor told his city commission: "Let the Negro settlement be placed further to the north and east." The courts overruled that ordinance four months later, but by then Blacks had lost precious time in rebuilding.

As to rehabilitation and restitution, there never would be any. Behind closed doors, Tulsa's white leaders plotted to do precisely the opposite of their proclamations. The Executive Welfare Committee in charge of "relief" efforts voted to solicit no money for aid, nor accept any donation, "financial or otherwise," to "reconstruct the Negro District." What money did come in to the Welfare Committee was used to reimburse the Red Cross for its Herculean efforts immediately following the riot. Scott Ellsworth pored over the official records while researching his book. "One myth that persists is that the white community created a generous relief effort and rebuilt Black Tulsa," he recently told a reporter for the Tulsa World. "The city fathers tried to keep Black Tulsans from rebuilding. They tried to swindle them out of their land. They refused donations from charitable organizations around the country, telling people they were going to rebuild the Black community." The winter of 1921-22 would find close to 1,000 Black Tulsans with nothing but tents to protect them from the cold and snow.

Hundreds of Blacks left Tulsa immediately after the riot, never to return. One of these was A.J. Smitherman, the editor of the Tulsa Star, whose business had been destroyed and whose name had been added to the grand-jury indictment. Gone too, was Stradford. The day after the riot, he and his wife had been held under "police protection" along with some 6,000 Black residents. But with the help of some white acquaintances, Stradford managed to leave town and eventually made his way to by train to Independence, Kansas, to stay with his brother. The day after his arrival, the Kansas police knocked on his brother's door and arrested Stradford, on the grounds of having incited the riot. The evidence: testimony that the first armed carloads of Blacks had left from in front of Stradford's hotel on Greenwood Avenue. Stradford was quoted as saying after his arrest: "They wanted me and now they have me."

There followed a law-enforcement soap opera. Tulsa wanted Stradford extradited. The attorney general of Oklahoma, along with the Tulsa County attorney, traveled to Topeka to plead with the governor of Kansas, bringing letters "from prominent men in Tulsa" assuring the governor that Stradford "would be given a fair trial and would be adequately protected from mob violence." The governor was convinced and ordered Stradford rearrested. But Stradford was no fool. Already out on bail, he fled with his son to Chicago.

As for Deputy Sheriff Barney Cleaver, he became the toast of Tulsa. Although the town's newspapers showed little remorse that the entire Black section had been burned to the ground, they were sympathetic about Cleaver's losses, which were considerable. Cleaver had amassed $ 20,000 (about $ 200,000 today) worth of real estate on a policeman's pay. If this were not enough to raise questions about Cleaver's conduct, an article about him in the Tribune strongly suggested that he was playing a double game: "In all of Tulsa today there was just one Negro who walked the street openly and unafraid, molested by no one and greeted with a cheery smile by all who knew him."

What had Cleaver done to deserve such good will? Whatever he had done before, he now sided with the whites in blaming his fellow Blacks for the riot. Two days after the riot, Cleaver was quoted as saying: "I am going to do everything I can to bring the Negroes responsible for the outrage to the bars of justice. They caused me to lose everything I have been accumulating and I intend to get them." Get them he did. It was largely Cleaver's testimony, in court and out, that helped convince white Tulsa that it was blameless.

Dick Rowland was released from jail two weeks after the riot. Sarah Page dropped her charges three months later, and left town. Police Chief John Gustafson was found guilty on two counts: dereliction of duty during the riot and "conspiracy to free automobile thieves and collect rewards." Sheriff McCullough admitted to the press later that he had fallen asleep. "I didn't know there had been a riot until I read the papers the next morning at 8 o'clock," he said. Reminded that he too had signed the telegram requesting the aid of the National Guard in the middle of the night, the sheriff said he had not bothered to read it. Richard Lloyd Jones suffered a fitting fate for his role in triggering the riot. Eight years later he commissioned his cousin to build a house in Tulsa. It would be perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright's least successful house, a towering sprawling affair that resembled a penitentiary and leaked like a fishing trawler.

As for the Black community of Tulsa, it soon rebuilt Greenwood without the promised help. In the '30s and '40s, the area experienced something of a revival as one of the country's leading jazz centers. But in the decades that followed, Greenwood decayed. Dissected by highways, emptied by suburban drift and enervated by integration, the neighborhood finally succumbed to the bulldozer. Today, all that remains of "the Black Wall Street" is a single gentrified block of Greenwood Avenue, surrounded by new urban-renewal projects: a new university complex, a duck pond and a new cultural center that houses a jazz museum.

DREAMS OF A MEMORIAL TO THE TULSA TRAGEDY HAD long been popular in the city's Black community, where the riot had never been forgotten. Don Ross, a Black State representative, had been trying to put together some sort of commemoration since the 50th anniversary in 1971. And James Goodwin, a Black lawyer whose family owns the Oklahoma Eagle, had gone so far as to draw up elaborate plans for a memorial and museum.

What was missing was white participation and enthusiasm. Without white support, fund-raising would be far more difficult and the point entirely lost.

Enter Ken Levit. A young law graduate and former staffer for Sen. David Boren, Levit had the fragmentary knowledge of the riot usual among white Tulsans. "I knew that some racial incident of historic proportion took place," he says. "I didn't really understand any of the details--where, when, why, and how." While studying for the bar in the summer of 1994 he came upon Ellsworth's "Death in a Promised Land." Around the same time, a project for Yale Law School took Levit to Argentina, where issues of the past, of memory and reconciliation are as powerful as anywhere in the world. Levit witnessed the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo marching outside the Government House to protest that country's more than 10,000 "disappeared" and realized that Tulsa shared some of the same issues--if on a smaller scale.

When Levit returned to Tulsa, the city's legal community was embroiled in an acrimonious and very public debate about another painful piece of Tulsa's history: the city's cozy relationship with the Ku Klux Klan.

Levit belonged to one of Tulsa's two "inns"--fraternal organizations of lawyers and judges. The other inn was called the Robert D. Hudson Inn, named in memory of one of Tulsa's most accomplished and beloved attorneys. Robert Hudson was the son of Washington Hudson, who during the early 1920s was a prominent trial attorney, the majority leader of the Oklahoma senate and the titular head of the Ku Klux Klan in Tulsa.

The Hudson-KKK connection had been vaguely understood by some members of the Robert D. Hudson Inn, but the feeling at the time was that the sins of the father should not be visited upon the son. That position became untenable in 1994, after some yellowing KKK membership rolls had been discovered in a Tulsa attic. Among the names listed around 1930 was that of Robert D. Hudson. A heated debate ensued that spilled over into the Tulsa newspapers.

"If we are to make clear that our view of equal rights and rule of law does not allow any compromise with vigilantism, racism or religious bigotry, we should change the name of this inn," said one of the members who had known and revered Robert Hudson as a brilliant lawyer, generous mentor and gentleman. Leading the forces to keep the name was the man who had suggested it in the first place, Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas R. Brett, founder of the inn and a former protege' and law partner of Hudson. Anguished by the proceedings, Brett wrote his colleagues: "In the process of being politically correct, we should not selectively attempt to rewrite history and condemn a few when the fact is our entire culture was the source of the problem." It was an elegant statement, but the 75 members of the inn cast their ballots, and the name change carried by a single vote.

Somehow that vote seemed to shift the tectonic plates of Tulsa. At a time when "the Hudson issue was beginning to bubble, but was not at a boil," Levit sat down with James Goodwin, a fellow inn member, to talk about the city's need to commemorate the riot. Those conversations eventually led Levit to Don Ross. Before long, Ross and Levit were busy formulating the plans for the 75th anniversary commemorative and raising money for a memorial.

The anniversary ceremony took place last year on June 1. It began with singing, prayers and speeches at Greenwood's Mt. Zion Baptist Church, itself a powerful symbol of the riot, having been torched only two months after its completion, and then lovingly rebuilt over the next 31 years. A crowd of 1,200 overflowed the church. On hand were Benjamin Hooks, former executive director of the NAACP, former senator David Boren, now the president of the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa Mayor Susan Savage and Scott Ellsworth. At one point Rep. Don Ross rose to say that over the last 75 years, no public official had ever apologized for the riot, so therefore he, an elected official, would do so. The irony that a black man was taking on the white man's burden of expiation was lost on no one. The guests then walked a few hundred yards to the dedication of a Maya Lin-style granite slab called the Black Wall Street Memorial.

The day's events left many a Tulsan, black and white, near tears. "That service was something of significance and real power," Levit recalled later. "For me, it was probably one of the most intense moments I have ever experienced. Don Ross was electrifying."

Plans for the commemoration of Tulsa's race riot made the Today Show. And watching Bryant Gumbel on the morning of May 31 happened to be J.B. Stradford's great-grandson, Chicago Circuit Court Judge Cornelius Toole. The judge thought that the Stradford family should be included in any commemoration of the riot, and he called the mayor's office and the Greenwood Cultural Center to lodge his protest. No one returned his call.

The judge then fired off letters, explaining J.B. Stradford's central role in Black Tulsa before the riot. Along with a photographic portrait, he sent this description of the patriarch of the Stradford clan: "He was magnificent, and had the courage and physical strength of a Mandingo warrior." Toole finished by mentioning the memoirs, which are still in the family's possession. "We are of course writing our own story of this era and his life.

Toole's letter set in motion a series of conversations that would lead to another moving ceremony. On October 18, Toole and 20 other members of the extended Stradford clan, who traveled from Texas, Illinois, Ohio, and New York, standing a stone's throw from where the Stradford Hotel once stood, listened as Bill LaFortune formally dropped the charges, and Oklahoma governor Frank Keating granted an honorary executive pardon.

At the request of the family, J.B. Stradford's name was added posthumously to a list of those allowed to practice law in Tulsa.

"It's regrettable that we have come here to recognize an embarrassment, a historical event that never should have happened," said Keating. "Our tragedy as Oklahomans is that [the Stradfords] are not [living] here." And he wasn't overstating the case: No Stradford had ever set foot in Tulsa since J.B.'s hasty departure, but the family had flourished. Stradford's son became a prominent Chicago lawyer and a founding member of the National Bar Association, arguing and winning Hansberry v. Lee, a crucial civil-rights case, before the U.S. Supreme Court. His granddaughter Jewel LaFontant-Mankarious, born one year after J.B.'s escape from Tulsa, would go on to become a deputy solicitor general and U.S. ambassador-at-large. Her son, John Rogers, Jr., is founder and president of Ariel Capital Investment in Chicago, and was named by Time magazine in 1994 as one of the country's most promising leaders under the age of 40. Another granddaughter, Letitia Toole, would become a stage and film actress and a member of the American Negro Theater, acting with Ossie Davis and Sidney Portier. and arrayed in front of Keating during the ceremony were four generations of Stradford's extended family, including a cardiologist, a tennis professional, a sculptor, a ballet dancer, and a movie director.

For his part, Judge Toole was delighted. "It was a wonderful ceremony," said the judge. "The governor spoke and made an apology to the Stradford family; he said something happened that should not have happened, and we know that, but I have never seen such a forceful apology." As for Don Ross, he seemed of two minds. On the one hand, he said, "The African American community of Tulsa can now say we were the victims and not the criminals in this racial upheaval." On the other, Ross still believes reparations are in order. He is thinking of introducing a bill that would pay out a total of $ 6 million to the families that lost everything in the riot. Nancy Little, too, doubts that Tulsa's season of remembrance and contrition can yet come to a close. "There is a time to leave the past behind," she mused. "I think that time is not when something has not been dealt with. Most people still do not know about it."

Perhaps the newsletter sent out by the Greenwood Cultural Center following the Stradford reception said it best. Under a photograph of the new memorial was a bit of verse that went:

"Things ain't what they oughta be, Things ain't what they gonna be, But thank God things ain't like they was."

This Is A Very Good Book

2005-11-10T15:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.stewartsynopsis.com/africans_wrote_the_bible.htm

Ancient Egyptians wrote the Holy Bible

An analysis by
Dr. Kwame Nantambu

"And ye Shall know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free." Holy
Bible, John 8:32.

According to Ghanian writer and researcher Nana Banchie Darkwah,
"Black Afrikans of ancient Egypt wrote the Holy Bible and the Catholic
Church is hiding and supressing this truth."

In his book titled, The Africans who wrote the Bible-Ancient secrets
Africa and Christianity Have Never Told, (2002), the author emphatically
states that, "the worst lie and sin of the church was the premeditated
transformation of the racial and ethnic identities of Jesus Christ, his
mother and the entire people of the Bible from the Black people they
were to White people, to satisfy emerging European racist sentiments
against Black people."

First of all, for one to understand the truth of the above statement
and accept it as a fact, that Black Afrikans of Ancient Egypt wrote the
Holy Bible, thus, one must dispel the erroneous notion and fabricated
lies that Christian Europe, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, have
done in painting the ancient Egyptians as pagans, devils, and heathens.

Also, one must understand that Christian Europe's and the Catholic
Church's motives for attacking Ancient Egypt in such negative vein, is due
to the fact that Ancient Egyptian High priests were the Scribes who
wrote what we come to know today as the Holy Bible. As a master-teacher
H.M. Maulana points out: "Ancient Egypt from its pre-dynastic period up
to its Golden Age of Pyramid building was an unadulterated predominantly
Black race of people (3500-2100 B.C.E.).

The descendants of these Ancient Egyptians are living throughout
Sub-Saharan Afrika, today, particularly in the nations of Ghana, Nigeria,
and Cote d'Ivoire." The very first "Bible", or "Scroll" on record
produced by man, with regards to paying honour and divine respect to a
"Creator of all Mankind" was that of the Afrikan people of the Nile Valley in
Ancient Kemet (Egypt) and Great Lakes regions of Central, East, and
Northern Afrika.

The book was called by its Afrikan Creators and developers, The Book
of the Coming Forth by Day and Night. It was translated from its
original Medu Netcher text into the English language by several Europeans
since the latter part of the 19th century A.D. The easiest one to read is
called, The Egyptian Book of the Dead. This work was translated by
British Egyptologist, Sir Ernest A. Wallis Budge. This original Bible was
produced by Black Afrikans approximately 3,400 years before the Old
Testament and more than 4,200 years before the New Testament, and countless
versions of it have been written and published. According to Darkwah,
the "Ancient Egyptians cross is the earliest and most sacred symbol of
religion.

Egyptologists who believe they have successfully deciphered Ancient
Egyptian Medu Netcher say it is called the Ankh, which means 'Life'." The
meaning is correct, however, that is not what the Ancient Egyptians
called it. The language from which this word originated is Akan and it
actually means Life. This symbol was the Ancient Egyptians' sacred
religious symbol that reinforced the cross on which Jesus was crucified,as a
sacred Christian symbol. How did this happen?

The early Christian Church of Ancient Egypt adopted the Nkwa symbol as
the symbol of their Church and called it Crux Ansata. From here, it was
taken to Rome and there it became a Christian symbol with only a slight
variation in design. The symbol of Nwka was excavated from the tomb of
the Akan King Tutu Ankoma, the boy King of Ancient Egypt, whose name
Europeans have corrupted to Tutankhamun or King Tut.

He ruled from 1336-1327B.C.E. Nana Darkwah suggests that the
intelligentsia of Ancient Egypt was headed by such ethnic groups as the Akan,
Ewe, Ga-Andangbe, Hausa, and Ibo. However, he asserts that the Akan was
the main ruling class in Ancient Egypt sincethe majority of Ancient
Egyptian Kings had Akan names. He also asserts that, "the early apostolic
fathers of Christianity and the Church knew of many things they did not
want the Christian masses to know about the background history,
content, and people of the Bible."

As a result, the very design of Christianity was based upon protecting
the Holy Bible from the lay masses. Until the reformation in the 15th
century A.D., therefore, the Holy Bible was secretly guarded and its
content was known to only a few in the Church. Because of the perceived
need to protect the Holy Bible from the masses, the earliest design and
practice of Christianity was based upon placing a cadre of priests
between the Holy Bible and the people.

The Afrikan origin of Christianity was common knowledge among western
scholars and early apolistic fathers of the Church long before the
European Renaissance. This was common knowledge known by the Aryan-Whites
in the past and is still known, today.

There have been numerous European scholars who have known and written
about the falsehoods, fabrications, and false assumptions in the
foundations of Christianity. One such European-American researcher and writer
was Gerald Massey, who in his book titled The Natural Genesis: A Book
of the Beginnings(1883), called the story and practice of
Euro-Christianity: "the legendary lying love." Moreover, in The Aryan Myth: A History
of Racist and Nationalistic Ideasin Europe, Leon Poliakov revealed
that, "knowledge of the people of the Bible as Black people was common in
Europe and in early European scholarship. "James Cowles, by far the most
popular anthropologists of the first half of the19th century,
elaborated around 1810 implying that "Adam and Eve were Black." And in 1836 a
renowned British orientalist, Sir Godfrey Higgins, wrote, The Anaclypsis.
Or an inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations, and Religions.

He pointed out that the people of the Bible were Black and that in all
early Catholic Churches of Europe: "the God Christ, as well as His
mother, are described in their old pictures to be Black (peoples). The
infant God in the arms of His Black mother, his eyes and drapery white, is
himself perfectly Black." In 1875, Kersey Graves wrote a book titled
The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors" in which he pointed out from clear
evidence in Europe that" Jesus was Black and the people of the Bible
were originally Black people"

He wrote as follows: There is as much evidence that the Christian
Savior was a Black man, or at least a dark man, as there is of him being
the son of the Virgin Mary or that he once lived or moved upon the earth.
And that evidence is the testimony of his disciples, who had nearly as
good an opportunity of knowing what His complexion was as the
evangelists who omit to say anything about it. In the pictures and portraits of
Christ by early Christians, He is uniformly represented as being
Black." Furthermore, he continues: "The statue of St. Peter inside St.
Peter's Basilica in Rome, Italy is a Black man. St. Peter was a Black man.

Thus, Jesus' last words before His execution was that a Black man has
the keys to Heaven." According to H.M. Maulana, the aristocracy of
Europe has always shown their hatred against the so-called Jewish people,
since it was well known in their socio-political and economic circles
that these people were of a Black Afrikan origin, who migrated out of
Ancient Egypt up into Europe. Due to the negative anthropological ideas
and theories of early European scholars against Black Afrikans, thus, the
knowledge and reality that theosophy and philosophy, has surely been a
major source of social-political embarrassment for Europeans.

The fact of the matter is that the racist and extremist European has
always seen the so-called Jewish people with suspicion and contempt
vis-à-vis their same contempt and ill-feelings they had towards Sub-Saharan
Afrikans. That is to say, historically, the Europeans had no genesis of
religion to claim as their own other than what came up "out of Afrika",
Christianity, which was brought to them by the so-called Jews. This
fact has left the European (Aryan-Whites) with bitterness, enmity, and
jealousy against the so-called Jewish people and Afrikans.

Also, this fermented ill-feelings among Europeans that the so-called
Jewish people had deliberately deceived them so that the Jews would
dominate Europe. According to Darkwah: "This is also the reason no credible
reason has been given for the most atrocious massacre of Blacks and
Jews in human history." In the final analysis, Afrikan people must know
that the "Aryan-White (European) tradition, Apolistic fathers of the
Church, theosophical teachings and writings, as well as the Arabs, have all
laboured over the past 500years, trying to disconnect Black Afrikans
from Ancient Egypt, in order to hide the true identity of the original
authors of the Bible and the origin from whence the Bible originated,
which was Ancient Egypt."

In essence, then, and in the tradition of European supremacy, "what
the Aryan-White race has attempted to do by high-jacking Ancient Egypt is
as follows: Kill the Messenger (Black Ancient Egyptians), but save and
embrace the 'Message' of the messenger for themselves"-that is, the
Holy Bible. The main purpose of European scholarship supremacy is "to
destroy the Black Afrikan genesis of Ancient Egypt and give the world a
counterfeit analysis of this great civilization as being a creation of the
Aryan-White race."

However, the late Dr. Chekh Anta Diop (the modern-day Imhotep),
capsulises the dire attempt by the Aryan-White race to "white-wash" Ancient
Egypt as follows: "Mankind trying to destroy the Black Afrikan genesis
of Ancient Egypt is like trying to drown a fish in the ocean."

Shem Hotep ("I go in peace").

Dr. Nantambu is an Associate Professor, Dept. of Pan-African Studies,
Kent State University, U.S.A.

Black Buying Power

2005-11-09T14:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.targetmarketnews.com/Buying%20Power%20report%2003.htm

Between 1990 and 2009, black buying power is expected to grow 203 percent, outpacing the buying power of whites and all races combined.

In its 2004 Minority Buying Power Report, an annual report of minority spending patterns, black spending is projected to rise from $318 billion in 1990 to $965 billion in 2009, representing 203 percent growth.
By comparison, white buying power is expected to rise 140 percent, while the total buying power of all races combined is expected to increase 159 percent.
Locally, spending by blacks is expected to increase from $25.7 billion this year in Pennsylvania to $33 billion by 2009 and from $28.6 billion this year in New Jersey to $37 billion in 2009. In 2009, blacks will comprise 8.7 percent of the nation's buying power, up from 7.4 percent in 1990.
Hispanic buying power is projected to increase from $7.4 billion this year in Pennsylvania to $10.8 billion in 2009 and from $26 billion this year in New Jersey to $36 billion in 2009. In 2009, Hispanics will comprise 9 percent of U.S. buying power, up from 5.2 percent in 1990.
The center projects Asian spending will increase from $7.6 billion this year in Pennsylvania to $11 billion in 2009 and from $22.4 billion this year in New Jersey to $34.3 billion in 2009.
White buying power is projected to rise from $334 billion this year in Pennsylvania to $408 billion in 2009 and from $256 billion in New Jersey this year to $316 billion in 2009.

African American Inventors

2005-11-09T13:17:00.000-08:00

If you didn't know any better you would think that we never invented nothing. But this is so untrue and I myself will show you thanks to other website that we have created great inventions that are in use this very day, and we are still creating great things. Here is one of many websites that you can visit. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa020600a.htm

I will be giving names of African Americans and there inventions.
Christopher P. Adams 6/24/1997 Method for performing amplification of nucleic acid with two primers bound to a single solid support , James S. Adams 10/19/1920 Propelling means for airplanes , Winser Edward Alexander 11/17/1970 System for enhancing fine detail in thermal photographs , Floyd Allen 11/11/1975 Low cost telemeter for monitoring a battery and DC voltage converter power supply , James Metthew Allen 6/29/1937 remote control , John S. Allen 4/14/1914 Package-tie , Charles Orren Bailiff 10/11/1898 Shampoo Headrest , Bertram F. Baker 4/27/1926 Automatic Cashier , David Baker 2/25/1913 railway Signal Apparatus, 9/21/1915 Signal Apparatus High Water Indicator for Bridges, 3/8/1827 Interliners to Prevent Tire Punctures , Benjamin Banneker 1791 Farmers' Almanac, Charles M. Banks 5/13/1930 Hydraulic Jack , William Barry 6/22/1897 Postal machine , Patricia Bath 5/17/1988 Apparatus for ablating and removing cataract lenses , 12/1/1998 Method and apparatus for ablating and removing cataract lenses , 7/6/1999 Laser apparatus for surgery of cataractous lenses , James A. Bauer 1/20/1970 Coin Changer Mechanism , Andrew Beard 7/5/1892 Rotary Engine, 11/23/1897 Car-coupler, Billie J. Becoat 5/26/1992 Dual wheel driven bicycle , Landrow Bell 5/23/1871 Locomotive Smoke Stack , Alfred Benjamin 6/19/1962 Stainless Steel Scouring Pads , Edmond Berger 2/2/1839 Spark plug , Alfred A. Bishop 3/7/1978 Nuclear Reactor with Self-Orificing Radial Blanket , Albert B. Blackburn 1/10/1888 Railway Signal , Anthony Brown 11/2/1999 Severe weather detector and alarm, 6/13/2000 Weather detector 7/22/2003 Severe weather detector and alarm , Oscar. E. Brown 8/23/1892 Horse Shoe , Hugh M. Browne 4/29/1890 Sewer or other trap , John Albert Burr 5/9/1899 Lawn Mower , William F. Burr 10/31/1899 Switching Device for Railways , Gus Burton 4/7/1885 Type-writing machine , George Washington Carver Paints & Stains, Emmett W. Chappelle 8/27/1976 Method of Detecting & Counting Bacteria , William N. Cobbs 11/4/1930 Locomotive headlight , William D. Davis 10/6/1896 Riding saddle , Anthony L. Dent 8/24/1982 Toothpaste containing pH-adjusted zeolite, Joseph Hunter Dickinson 1/8/1918 Phonograph , Lewis B. Dorcas 10/15/1907 Stove, Clarence Gregg 8/27/1918 Machine gun.

That was just a few of many not including the ones the was stolen by white men.

J.A. Rogers was a self-educated bibliophile who dedicated his life to collecting information about black people throughout history.

2005-11-09T00:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.users.fast.net/~blc/blac2.htm

BLACKFACT:

In 1787 while a party of 351 freed 'Negroes' was aboard ship at Portsmouth England, enroute to Sierra Leone, West Africa, the authorities brought on board sixty-two white women, prostitutes and others, whom they wished to get rid of, and married them to as many men, and sent them off to be the future mothers of the colony.

PROOF:

Utting says: "They sailed in 1787 from Portsmouth with 60 white women whom the Government wished to exile; the latter were made drunk, carried on board, and married to the 'Negroes' without their consent being asked." (F.A.J. Utting: Sierra Leone, p. 81, London, 1931).

Mrs. A. M. Falconbridge, who talked with these women in Sierra Leone says that they "were mostly of that description of persons who walk the streets of London and support themselves by the earning of prostitution; that men were employed to collect and conduct them to Wapping where they were intoxicated with liquor, then inveigled on board ship and married to Black men whom they had never seen before." (Voyages to Sierra Leone in 1791-2-3, pp. 64-66).

BLACK FACT:

White American slave-holders used to induce white women to marry 'Negro' slaves in order to hold the women slaves for life.

PROOF:

In Sept. 1664, Maryland passed a law that any white woman who married a 'Negro' should serve the master of such slave "for life." Slave-holders took advantage of this law to induce the white women, some of whom were recent arrivals, to marry the "Negroes." MacCormac says, "Instead of preventing such marriages this law enabled avaricious and unprincipled masters to convert many of their (white) servants into slaves." In 1681, the Legislature was forced to issue the following law: "Divers freeborn English or white women sometimes by the instigation, procurement, and connivance of their master.... and always to the satisfaction of their lascivious and lustful desires....do intermarry with 'Negroes' and other slaves, be it enacted that if any master....having any freeborn English or white woman servant in their possession or property, shall by any instigation, procurement, knowledge, permission or contrivance," cause her to marry a slave she should be free at once and the master should pay a fine of "10,000 lbs. of tobacco." (Archives of Maryland, Vol. I, pp. 433-34; and Vol. III, pp. 203-04, also Johns Hopkins University Studies in Hist. & Pol. Science, No. 3 & 4.) What is true of Maryland was true of other states.

BLACK FACT:

(As of 1930) the white population of New York (was) a third more illiterate than the 'Negro' one.

PROOF:

In New York there (were) 375,999 illiterates in a white population of 10,513,933 or 3.6%. 'Negro' illiterates (were) 8,604 in a population of 347,381 or 2.5 % (1930 Census, Vol. II, p. 1229).

COMMENT: I wonder what the stats look like today? (BLC)

BLACKFACT:

Beethoven, the world's 'greatest' musician, was without a doubt a dark 'mulatto.' He was called "The Black Spaniard." His teacher, the immortal Joseph Haydn, who wrote the music for the former Austrian National Anthem, was 'colored,' too.

BLACK FACT:

Imhotep of Ancient Egypt, was the real Father of Medicine. He lived about 2300 b.c. Greece and Rome had their knowledge of medicine from him. In Rome he was worshipped as the Prince of Peace in the form of a black man. His Ethiopian portraits show him a 'Negro.' Imhotep was also Prime Minister to King Zoser as well as the foremost architect of his time. The saying, "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die," has been traced to him. Hippocrates, the so-called "Father of Medicine," lived 2,000 years after Imhotep.

PROOF:

Gerald Massey says of Imhotep, "The child-Christ remained a starrily bejewelled blackamoor as the typical healer in Rome. Jesus the divine healer, does not retain the black complexion of Iu-em-hotep (Imhotep) in the canonical Gospels, but he does in the Church of Rome when represented as a little black bambino." ...(I cut a major portion out here for brevity. For those who would like the entire passage, E-mail me. BLC).

"Surely the profoundest sigh of an ever-warring world went up to heaven in the cult of Iu-em-hotep (Imhotep) who was worshipped as the giver of rest, the Kamite prince of peace." (Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World, Vol. II, p. 754, London, 1907.)

The statuettes of Imhotep in the Cairo Museum show his Negroid features. They are reproduced in G. Daressy's, Catalogue General des Antiquities Egyptiennes du Musee du Caire, Plate IV, 38,045 to 38,050, and Plate V.

COMMENT: Speaking of Christ having been black, it was surprising to me how many white Spaniards in the Barcelona area of Spain INSIST that Christ was black. During my visit there in 1982, I went to Montsarrat, a monestary just outside of Barcelona, where the Madonna and Christ child are depicted as 'coal' black. (BLC).

BLACKFACT:

Dr. Daniel Williams, Chicago surgeon who died in 1931, was the first to perform a successful operation on the human heart.

PROOF:

Medical Record, March 27, 1897. The patient was James Cornish. Dr. Williams lived in Chicago. I (J.A. Rogers) knew him personally for many years.

BLACKFACT:

On November 15, 218 B.C., Hannibal, a full-blooded 'Negro,' marching through conquered territory in Spain and France, performed the astounding feat of crossing the Alps. With only 26,000 of his original force of 82,000 men remaining, he defeated Rome, the mightiest military power of that age, who had a million men, in every battle for the next fifteen years. Hannibal is the father of military strategy. His tactics are still taught in the leading military academies of the United States, Enland, France, Germany and other lands.

PROOF:

Hannibal is usually depicted as a white man, but his coins in the British Museum and the Museo Kercheriano, Rome, show him to have been an African of purest type with rings in his ears. Col. Hennebert, perhaps the leading authority on Hannibal, declares that none of the several differing portraits now exhibited as Hannibal is he, "We do not possess any authentic portrait of Hannibal," he says. (Histoire d'Annibal, Vol. I, p. 495, Paris, 1870). These coins were struck by Hannibal while he was in Italy. In the absence of other information the most logical argument is that they bore his own effigy, the more so, as the several kinds of them bear the same likeness. Above all, let us remember that he was an African.

Needing The Brother ManTo Beat The Other Man

2005-11-08T22:48:00.000-08:00

The United States would not have won any wars without black men, and that's a fact. Black men have taken parts in all of this country's wars. The first American to shed blood in the revolution that freed America from the British rule was Crispus Attucks, a black seaman. He was killed by British troops in the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. One of the outstanding heroes of the Battle of Bunker Hill was Peter Salem from Framingham, Massachusetts. Salem fired the shot that killed Major John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines the man second in command of the British expedition. Read this book to find out much more Blacks in America's Wars by Robert W. Mullen